There's no one who's really not a reader. They just clearly haven't
found the right book yet. I am very confident in saying that
there is a book for everyone. I am very glad that
it's part of my job and it's something that I take pride in
doing is helping you find that book. Hi, I'm Tyler. Welcome to Office Hours.

This is what I do at HarperCollins. [MUSIC] I am a digital marketer at
HarperCollins Children's Books. Epic Reads is a digital brand within
HarperCollins Children's Books. We're all about the wide community. As part of the digital marketing team,
a lot of what I'm doing is putting out content on Epic Reads to the website and
social channels. And then also kinda coming
up with fun ideas for how to market all the amazing
books that we got. If I had to describe my job to someone who
didn't know anything about publishing, I would say that I create
really weird listicles and quizzes for books that are really
great and hit important topics.

But also help you find out who your God
would be if you were in an elemental gladiator match. So it's the best of both worlds. I feel like a lot of things that I did for
fun growing up indirectly or directly influenced my
job at Harper right now. When I was in middle school,
I was coding layouts on Xanga and making graphics and icons. And now I'm self-taught in photoshop and
HTML. And now I do that for
our graphics and our newsletters. I write for fun and I feel that helps my
voice because it's a very distinctive, snarky voice that for
some reason works on a published website. I think one of the most important
responsibilities that I have as a member of team Epic Reads and being in
the digital space and seeing all these books is being able to know and help get
the right books into the readers' hands.

I think whether that's creating an article
that's, wow, you have to read these books. And making sure we're hitting all the
keywords just in case they happen to be searching for something. Or a Twitter thread with, hey,
you might not know these books have this representation, but they do thread,
and just kind of listing them below. Maybe it's an Instagram photo,
maybe it's a weird Instagram meme. There are all these different channels
where things to social media and kind of the digital space. Out of all these different places, we can only hope that kind of one of them
will hit the target and find that reader.

And hopefully change their lives for
the better. [MUSIC] A day in my life,
I feel like no two days are ever the same. Some days I'm writing a lot, editing and looking through articles and kind of
planning things out for the website. I told myself I was gonna read today. And instead, I wrote a quiz to see
which Greek god would be your parent. And I have no regrets. Other days I am on Instagram and
Twitter very closely. Other days I'm going through the Facebook
group and seeing what people are saying, what they wanna do. Other days I'm gauging reactions to
books that have already come out. Other days I am seeing how we can
position books that aren't coming out for another year and a half. There's not as much reading
in my actual day to day, because I do that outside of work time
because thankfully, it is still fun. I think it's coming up with
all these different ways. It's working really closely with
the team and throwing ideas around and being like, can we do this? But then we can turn it into this,
and playing a lot of that.

It's trying to figure out how I can
convince people who don't think that they're really readers that no, you don't
have to be a reader to love this book or to read this book. I think what excites me the most about
what I do at Harper is that there's limitless possibilities. We can have an idea and be like,
listen, this might sound crazy, but we think it's gonna work. Everyone at Harper is so great they'll be like, okay, come up
with a plan, let's see what you think. I can kind of be [LAUGH] unhinged and
have fun. I can be like, did you like
this TV show that only ran for one season and
hasn't aired a new episode in five years? I think you'll like these books.

And everyone will be like,
yeah, that's a good one. You made a good point. I think one of the best things
about getting to work at Epic Reads is that we really get to listen and
talk to the community. We really try to listen to what they're
saying and what they wanna see and what they like and what they don't like. We kind of get to represent the readers in
a way that a lot of other positions in and outside of publishing, they don't
have that kind of face to face with the people they're
actually selling books to.

I think what inspired me to seek out
publishing as a career is that I didn't know what I wanted to do. I knew what I liked. I liked reading. I liked writing. I liked being creative. There was one marketing class I
took in college where I got to make a whole campaign deck, and
I chose to do it around DC Comics and how I would market their female heroes. When I heard about the publishing course, I was like, I could do things with
books professionally, that's cool.

And at the course I found out about
marketing, and publicity, and all these different facets that I
didn't know existed before that. I can take all that marketing and
creative stuff that I really like and apply it to the book
stuff that I really like. That was kind of when I realized
this is the sweet spot, this is the overlap in the Venn
diagram that I didn't know existed. I think I've also gotten really good
at recommending books to people. You could tell me any three
random things about yourself. And it could be your favorite TV show or
your favorite color. And I'll be like,
I think you would really like this book. And I pride myself on the fact that I do
think you would really like that book. I'm probably right. I think working in books right now is just
a really great space to be because books were already kind of at the forefront of
getting more diverse voices out there.

So I think as we continue to do that,
and we continue to hear from more and more non-white, non-straight voices,
publishing is really at the top of that game and we're trying to
get as many voices out there as possible. And also kind of selfishly, I think it's
great that more books are being adapted because A, I love to watch them, even if
the books are 98% of the time better.

And also it's exposing it to an audience
that would never have picked up the book because they either didn't know about
it or thought they wouldn't like it. There are so many great things that
have come out of this and so many, I think, more books that should
be published are being published. There's always something
else you could be doing. And whether that's helping out people
around you or just talking to someone or even just having fun, writing or reading
for fun, or relaxing and watching TV. There's always something you can do
to better everyone around you and also to not abandon your creativity. Those are my two things,
my driving principles. I think the thing that drives me in my
career is being able to see, I think, even in the last four years,
how much publishing has grown. And there's still a long way to go. But I mean, there's so many books
now coming out by so many different types of authors and authors who
identify in so many different ways. And being able to be a part of that from
the inside and doing everything I can to make sure that those books get into
the hands of readers that need them.

I think that's a really great
thing to be able to focus on and say that that's what I do every day. Thanks for watching. Check out some of our
other Office Hours videos. Make sure you like and
subscribe if you haven't already. [MUSIC].

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